Wednesday, August 05, 2009

The Town Hall Putsch

The fascists have really made a lot of progress towards the orgasmic Götterdämmerung they so desperately lust for (in the blind way the salmon yearn to drop their loads in the sand upriver). What with deciding that the superrich cannot possibly do with a little less (the Bush tax cuts) and that we should fight two elective wars without raising taxes, they have pretty much succeeded in bankrupting the national government. This is useful to them in that it promotes the Liferaft Mentality that gets normally decent or at least complacent people looking wildly to throw others over the side.

Now they're demonstrating a diabolical, time-honored principle: when you can excite a people's perceived self-interest, and blend it with their reptilian revulsion for the Other, and make them believe the resultant discontent is a higher calling, a reverence for an abstract good (say, "states' rights," or "fiscal responsbility" or "racial purity") then you get an explosion of passion you can exploit in any number of ways. This is precisely what American fascists are doing with the town hall shouting over the health care debate.

At the risk of sounding elititist, I note that the shouters (many of whom are, hypocritically enough, obviously on Medicare, and many of the younger others, being very doughy Fox fans, will doubtless absorb a disproportionate share of health-care dollars before their beer guts finally kill them) are almost universally pasty-faced and dressed in Walmart disposable prole-wear. The modulation of the their voices, the contortions of their faces, has been looking eerily familiar to me, and last evening, as I ran past the Tuesday seranade in the National Cathedral belltower, it came to me: they are possessed by the same demons that were loose in the streets fifty years ago in Little Rock, New Orleans, Richmond. You can see it in the old news footage, see it in the faces above.

Just as the white trash didn't want real public schooling for black folks, they don't want public health for the black and brown either, even if their own kin have to suffer to prevent the preventitive benefits of such socialized elightenment. (It's not at all coincidence that the plan is regarded as Obama's.) The Foxagandists have managed to make the "public option" an egregious dipping into the public trough (rather than a lifting of all boats). As a result, Real Americans, of the Palin-fan variety, regard that public trough as their own personal foodbowl, and they will snarl and bite and fight like starving dogs to keep Others away from it.